Where Lilacs Still Bloom (20 page)

“Their husbands might not have been as enthusiastic as ours,” Beatrice noted.

“Or they lacked proper negotiating skills,” Shelly said.
“My husband wasn’t all that enamored with my going, but I guilted him into letting me.”

“Guilted him?” Mavis turned to her friend. “What sort of word is that?”

“A very useful one,” Shelly trilled. “Very useful. Oh, he knows what I’m doing when I ruffle his hair and tell him how sad I am that he’s always leaving me during the week to work, and then on the weekends, he has this ‘other woman’ he devotes his time to.”

“His mother.” Mavis patted Shelly’s gloved hand resting on an umbrella she might later need for shade.

“No, his lilacs. He’s always out there in the garden, and even when I’m right beside him in the greenhouse, he speaks more to the cultivars than to me. I call them ‘the other women,’ and out of guilt, he lets me do things he otherwise might not or that his mother finds foolish. Like this trip. Especially this trip.”

“I know a woman or two who secure fine jewelry out of their husbands’ guilt.” Beatrice was closer to Shelly’s age and was without children too. The three of them formed a cluster at the horticultural events.

“We’re standing on our own two feet,” Mavis said, bringing them back to the article by Margaret Sangster. “Being here, doing what we feel is necessary for our survival.”

“How does a woman actually do that?” Shelly’d been trying to strike out on her own as a wife, but it took enormous energy just to disagree with Minnie Snyder about a table serving.
The interactions wore her down. If only she could have given Bill a child by now. She would have gained credibility with her mother-in-law and had a purpose in her life. “I sometimes feel lost in my efforts to stand on my own.” Shelly sighed.

“As do we all.” Mavis shaded her eyes with her hands, looking for the autobus.

Her companions quieted, allowing the noise of the engine of the approaching vehicle to fill the summer morning. Mavis fanned herself. Beatrice loosened the button at her neck.

“Margaret Sangster says, ‘Pluck counts more than luck,’ ” Shelly said.

“Did you see where she advised one young woman to consider pet-stock breeding as a way to earn a living? Angora cats were mentioned.” Beatrice had a slight lisp that caused Shelly to listen carefully whenever she spoke.

“Does the world need more cats?” Mavis asked. “I should think that to help one’s neighbors while standing on one’s own two feet would mean more than the nurturing of cats or thoroughbred dogs. I’d say a leader more like—”

“Mrs. Edward Gilchrist Low.”

“Who?” Shelly furrowed her brow. The name was unfamiliar to her.

“Imagine, starting a school of your own like that.” Beatrice shook her head in wonder, and the ostrich feather fluttered at her face.

“What school?” Shelly said.

“Oh, it’s a landscape architecture school, for women.”

“Truly?” Shelly turned away from the approaching bus to stare at her friend. “Where?”

“Massachusetts. Their graduates travel about and consult on the great estates as well as smaller gardens. I suspect at the Hampton estate we’ll see evidence of the Lowthorpe School.” Mavis seemed well informed. “Imagine bringing beauty into the lives of others like that.”

“And getting to travel and work with interesting people. From all over the country. Even Europe,” Beatrice mused.

“Yes, imagine.” The autobus pulled up in front of their meeting site. The driver stepped out. Their club leader scuttled to the front of the group and explained what would happen next, asking people to be calm. Calm would be difficult for Shelly, for she’d just had an epiphany, her anxiety no longer related to transportation but rather pushing her toward a plan to stand on her own.

The three women ducked their heads and hats as they stepped up into the vehicle. Shelly’s feet felt light at this new adventure as she made her way down the aisle, glad she didn’t have to manage a bustle as well as her carpetbag.

A school for women interested in landscape architecture. Shelly had hoped to design a garden when she had her first child and after that for each milestone of the child’s life: the day she started school, her first pony ride ribbon, her first
grade of Superior, her first formal dance. It would be more than simply planting a tree or plant to honor someone; it would be a story of a life, told in flowers. A story of her child’s life.

But none of those gardens would occur without the child, and it looked like that wasn’t going to happen. She had lost two babies. She was barren.

The idea of designing gardens for others—consulting with a mother to create her stepping-stone landscapes in honor of her child’s growing—might be how she’d create and wash away the fruitless part of her existence.

“Isn’t this fun?” Beatrice settled into a seat.

“It surely is.” Shelly selected a leather seat facing the aisle.

“I wonder what we’ll take away from this trip,” Mavis said. “I always try to bring something back to use in my garden.”

“I’ve already found my wisdom,” Shelly said. “Now I just have to make it happen.” Make it happen, indeed.

A
fter the funeral, Dr. Alice told me that for a time we’d all have to be watched to be sure there were no early signs of that dreaded tuberculosis disease, since we’d all had time with Nell Irving before he went to the sanitarium. Some of us could be carriers and give it to others without our ever becoming sick ourselves. I thought that a double evil of a disease, making every one wary and watching one another every time someone sneezed over a hydrangea or magnolia bloom.

I was tired of grieving, tired of all it took to make sense of the vagaries of life. A terrible earthquake had struck San Francisco in April, and the churches in town had worked together to send bandages and medicine to that troubled community. I was grateful we had no relatives there, for there was distress enough right in our house. Lizzie’s ache had returned with her sister’s loss, and Delia, always quick to find a cheerful
solution to a problem, couldn’t find the route to calm. The Lewis River flooded, and I had a change of grief by directing Frank and Fritz to build log rafts.

“Rafts?” Frank washed at the sink. “For what?”

“We’re going to pull the lilacs and put them on the rafts until the water goes down. Tie the rafts to the trees.”

“Pull them up by the roots, Ma?” Fritz said. “Won’t that kill them?”

“No. It’ll stress them, but it will also save them. We’ll have to replant.”

I knew it meant much work, but physical labor was good for the heartache pushing against my ribs. The rafts were built, and they worked, my lilacs like fragile children huddling on a churning sea as the rafts bumped against the tree trunks. The water receded, and the sun came out, so that before long, even the daphne, a plant that abhors wet soil, perked up. But still, I could not convince Delia that she should come home, that her baby should be born closer to the doctor’s office, not way out there on her farm. Frank brought a load of aged manure from the pasture on the Bottoms, and we mulched it in with the garden earth. We were replanting the lilacs when Ruth’s father, Barney Reed, stopped by to pick up Ruth for the weekend.

“Fair amount of work you have to do then, eh?”

“We saved the lilacs, though, Papa.” Ruth pointed to the log rafts now stacked beside the potting shed.

“God gives us challenges to shape our ways,” he said.

“And he gives us new blooms each spring as a reminder He’s always with us,” I countered. While I agreed with him, I didn’t want him suggesting that those challenges were any more than a flood in spring or a neighbor’s horses running through the lilacs.

Barney nodded, but he chewed on his mustache, so I knew he had other thoughts. He adjusted his glasses.

“We should go, Papa. Mrs. Hulda has a lot of work to do.” I heard the horse at Barney’s buggy stomp its impatience and noticed Ruth’s subtle urging of her father to leave.

“You’ve had a fair number of sad challenges in these past years since you’ve been messing with creation.” Barney adjusted his glasses.

“All part of learning new things. Nothing troubling about that.”

“Maybe. Or maybe you’re being taught a lesson.”

“About hybridizing? Oh yes, I’m learning a great deal about patience and persistence, keeping good records that my husband helps with and my girls. We’ve had a good time together, making this garden a place where people come now and again to be reminded of the refreshment creation brings. Not to mention the lessons of weeding before it gets out of hand or how each season requires new things of us.”

“The Bible teaches that gardens are places for wrestling with temptation, Mrs. Klager.”

“Oh, snakes are good things in a garden. They get after the insects and gophers.”

I wished Ruth would leave, as I didn’t want to argue with her father in front of her. I wasn’t sure how long I could keep my happy chatter voice, especially when each evening I wrestled with whether my fervor for lilacs, for “messing with creation,” might have brought on the pain my children suffered from.

“Mama will be waiting.” Ruth touched her father’s arm crossed over his chest.

“Suffering happens for a reason, Mrs. Klager. You best discover why it might be happening for you.” Ruth tugged at his sleeve, and they left.

The man infuriated. I fairly burned my hoe up the rest of the day, chopping at crab grass, bending instead of squatting to pull weeds, making myself suffer, as though that would remove Barney’s words and their echo of my own. It did trouble me that so powerful a God would let bad things happen. And I often did learn something when a tragedy struck. But did I have to suffer to learn the lesson?

“Will you be out here all night?” Frank stepped out onto the porch. “Lizzie put a plate back for you. She makes a good meat loaf.”

“I wanted to finish this plot, get it ready for the annuals.”

“No. You’ve got a bee under your bonnet. What is it?” He came beside me, touched my shoulder.

We could hear frogs croaking and cooing of doves settling in for the night.

“Oh, Frank, Barney Reed … He just said out loud what I’ve been wondering myself, and yet I can’t believe that God would make Lizzie and Delia and their husbands’ families too, and us, suffer just because I’m interested in lilacs and propagating and hybridizing. I can’t believe that doing what I have a gift for cuts against God’s grain. Do I care too much about the garden? Have I ignored my family? Is that why Delia won’t come stay with us?”

He took the hoe and led me to the swing on the porch.

“I submit those are questions for the reverend, not for me. Why do those we love have to die while we go on living? Can’t answer that, Huldie. It just seems to be what is. But I do know that your crisp apples keep reminding me that God gave you all the materials and the inclination and willingness to persist. Can’t see that as divine defiance. It’s a gift, and you’d be defying God if you ignored it. That’s what I submit.”

Could I have loved Frank more at that moment? I vowed to remember as much of our conversation as I could, especially when thoughts of uncertainty snuck in like snakes in the grass.

I renewed my efforts to convince Delia to come home and to appreciate more my shrubs and the joy they gave me. Lizzie and I made planting notes in my book that Frank rewrote in legible form. I checked the tin labels and compared
them to what I observed or witnessed in the lilac nursery as I’d come to think of the rows and rows of plantings. Several of the shrubs were over four feet high, and I had hundreds of starts to pollinate.

In June, blooms and fragrance permeated the yard, the neighborhood, in fact. Emil and Tillie lived next-door with son Albert and their two girls, Elma and Hazel, and even Elma, only seven, said how nice it was to “smell pretties” every morning.

Then, two miracles: a double pale lilac, nearly cream, appeared. Lavender Pearl I named it, and if those plants and new seeds gave up that color again, I’d have my first unique variety. Then to my absolute delight, one of the deep purples I’d crossed with the Lemoine presented me a single bloom with six petals! Six!

“Frank, you’ve got to come here and see this!” I dragged him from the barn to look at that shrub, making a note of the label, my eyes seeking any others with six petals or even five.

“Imagine, Frank! Six petals!”

“Good work, Huldie.” He patted my back. “Were you breeding this one for petals? I thought it was the color you went for.”

“Color, yes, but increased petals, oh my, yes, that too. I’d love twelve petals one day.” I wiped at my eyes. “Imagine,” I said. “Crying over petals.”

Frank smiled. “Twelve’s a mighty big number.”

“It’s only twice as many as this one.” I cradled the deep purple bloom in the palm of my hand, fingering the tiny petals, velvet gems; counting and recounting.

Giddy
was too weak a word to describe how I felt.